Stephanie

My relationship with Stephanie started out purely platonic. We met on a message board discussing religion, rock bands, and creative writing. She had recently finished shoulder surgery and filed a restraining order against her ex-husband who attacked her in a drunken rage. Although we were friends, I was pretty sure what might happen when I offered to let her and her sons, Corey age 10, and Cody age 9, stay with me while she recovered from her surgery and while she dealt with the legal issues surrounding her ex-husband. I knew there was a mutual attraction, but she needed to move somewhere safer for her and her boys, so I took them in.


We were both recently out of bad break ups and even though I had four bedrooms in my town-home, it wasn’t long before we had a vacant guest room. Stephanie was honest with me about her past. She was a former exotic dancer and a teenage heroin addict who use methadone to free herself from heroin and then picked up a crystal meth habit just as she was weaning herself off methadone. She’d been arrested multiple times on drug charges and was serving probation.


Her parents were the boys’ foster parents and didn’t trust her to raising them. They routinely sent child custody services to check on them. But they confided in me they were happy with the environment I was providing. The boys had new clothing, were clean, eating healthy, attending school everyday, and not getting in trouble. Corey and Cody were smart boys dealt a very difficult hand in life. They’d been relocated across the country several times and never lived in once house for more than a year due to their mother’s problems.


Knowing all of this, I fell for her anyway. There were things about her that were unlike any woman I’d met. She had a direct, cut straight to the bone wit and fiery passion. She loved photography and fine art and could discuss these subjects on the level of a humanities teacher. She was college educated, although she never finished her studies. She had made the most out of learning the things she enjoyed before her life self destructed.


Everyone I knew told me Stephanie was bad news and that she couldn’t keep her life together for long. Her parents warned me that it was only a matter of time before she’d self destruct again and when that happened, make sure to get their grandchildren to them so they could prevent child services from taking them. Stephanie herself told me she loved me and she was doing her best to get clean for good, but not to trust her.


I quickly learned not to keep alcohol in the house. If there was a 6 pack of beer in the fridge at 8 in the morning when I left for work, it was gone by the time I came home. If there was liquor in a cabinet, I could expect it to disappear quickly. Even my cooking wine was emptied. When I tried to confront her about it, she told me “Having one beer a day doesn’t make me an alcoholic!” And when I told her I wasn’t buying alcohol anymore, she disappeared for a couple of days, finally being brought home by police after she had spent a night at a pub and the person she went home with couldn’t get rid of her.

In that time, her sons were terrified for her. The last time she disappeared, she was hospitalized with a broken shoulder and from a severe beating she received at the hands of their father. They were young, but they’d seen more bad things in their decade of living than most people see in an entire lifetime. I encouraged them to focus on homework and school and to believe their mother was alright. She was just going through a bad time.


After a long talk, we agreed the best thing would be for her to move her sons back in with her parents and I’d help her move into a new place. She hugged me and told me she loved me and we cried together for awhile, knowing it was over and we were never meant to be. She continued the conversation as she walked into the bathroom and suddenly, I heard a loud thump.

I rushed to the bathroom door which was unlocked, but I couldn’t push it open as her motionless body blocked the door. After several hard shoves, I found her turning blue, drooling heavily, and flopping like a dead fish on my bathroom tile. I frantically called an ambulance and waited as the operator talked me through CPR. Stephanie was cold and shivering. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She wasn’t responding. Corey and Cody walked in the room just as I started CPR and calmly assisted. They knew CPR better than me.  


Finally, the ambulance arrived and the paramedics were able to revive her. The police also arrived to inform me Stephanie had violated her probation and would be taken into custody after the hospital released her. Later, child custody services came to take the boys away. Since I wasn’t their father nor a legal guardian, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. Before they left, I sat down and started to explain when Cody, the youngest, cut me off and with the eyes of someone far older, he said: 


“We know what happened. Don’t worry about it. This happens all the time. Thanks for trying to help my mom.”

I never saw Stephanie again, but a year later, I received a letter from her informing me her sons were stuck in foster care, she was no longer allowed to visit them, and asking me how it felt to know that I had destroyed her family.